Senshini knew enough about the short history of the conflict on Septiam Torus to guess this was the big push. The first attack on the planet had taken place just a few weeks after Septiam Torus had been confirmed as having been tainted by Teturact. A regiment of Elysians had dropped onto the world from Valkyries by grav-chute. They had died almost to the man, finding themselves surrounded by masses of walking corpses where they had expected a handful of rebel private troopers. The Elysian Drop Troop regiments were considered elite formations but no amount of training would make a lasgun shot kill something that was already dead, especially when some of those living dead were former comrades.
The Imperial Guard had pulled out those Elysians they could and had sent in a regiment of more conventional ground-pounders, the Jouryan XVII. They besieged Septiam City. The Stratix XXIII, hard-bitten hive ganger conscripts itching for a chance to avenge their dead world, had been sent in to support them once it had become clear that the twenty thousand Jouryans couldn't take Septiam City themselves. The governor's own Gathalamorian Artillery were brought in to soften up the entrenched defenders prior to the inevitable assault.
In total, including the support and supply formations, Army Group Torus numbered just shy of a hundred thousand men.
Senshini, if he were being honest, didn't think it would be enough.
He had been with the Jouryans on Septiam Torus for three weeks. During that time he had heard some of the stories that patrols and kill-sweep teams had brought back. There were dead men out there, walking like the living. Some of them had once been Elysians. Some of them now were Jouryans. At least now the waiting was over, but, like everyone else in the armour section, Senshini feared what they might find inside the city.
He saw foot troops at the edges of his target viewer, figures hurrying past in the dark grey fatigues of the Jouryan XVII, black helmets and body armour already spattered with mud, lasguns held close to their chests.
The armour and infantry were to support one another as they closed in on the perimeter, the tanks breaching the walls and the infantry swarming through the gaps. Demolisher siege tanks were rumbling towards knots of shattered trees where they could scrounge some cover as they opened up at long range. Leman Russ tanks would close in, their medium-range guns shattering masonry and throwing defenders from the walls. The Executioners, of which there were only a handful amongst the Jouryans, would have to venture in further so their guns could fill the breaches with liquid fire before the infantry went in.
The Executioner was armed unlike any other Imperial Guard tank. Its Leman Russ-pattern chassis was topped with a massive plasma blastgun, most of the crew compartment crammed with the hot, thrumming plasma coils that fuelled the gun. An Executioner was a rare beast, hardly ever seen outside the forge worlds where the Adeptus Mechanicus jealously guarded the secrets of their manufacture, and the Jouryan XVII was fortunate indeed to have acquired any at all. It was Senshini's duty to fire the blastgun, and he knew that it would light up the tank to enemy spotters like a firework display.
Still, it could be worse, thought Senshini as he spotted broken figures moving between the shattered columns that broke the jumbled silhouette of the walls. He could be riding a Hellhound, the notorious and often ill-fated flamethrower tanks with external tanks full of promethium, which had to go into the teeth of the enemy to support the infantry with waves of fire.
Kaito, the Executioner's commander, swung open the top hatch and hauled himself up so he could see out. The awful battlefield smell rolled into the tank, cutting through even the electrical stink of the plasma coils - a stench of sickly rotting flesh and the heavy, charred smell of burning bodies.
'Hang left, Tanako!' called Kaito, 'Keep them beside us!'
Senshini, like Kaito, was well aware of the need to keep the infantry close alongside the tank. The Executioner had no sponson weapons to cover its side arcs, and it needed supporting infantry to minimise the chance of a lascannon or krak missile punching through the side armour.
Tanako, in the cramped driver's compartment below Senshini, swung the steering levers and the tank swerved to the left - Senshini could see through the targeter as the tank crept closer to the hunched Jouryans hurrying over the cratered mud.
Kaito dropped back into the tank and pulled the hatch down. 'Artillery's coming over.’ he said. Senshini saw that already the tank commander's face was streaked with engine grime and the shoulders of his officer's greatcoat were spattered with kicked-up mud. Kaito was a veteran who had lost his previous tank, a Vanquisher tank hunter, to enemy fire on Salshan Anterior and had only taken over the Executioner a week before. To both Senshini and Tanako, the man was a mystery - quiet and reserved, rarely speaking without reason, with a calm face that showed little sign of having witnessed the fiercest action on Salshan Anterior.
Even with the hatch down Senshini could hear the first salvoes of the artillery attack shrieking overhead.
The Gathalamorians' guns fired heavy, armour-cracking shells to shatter the walls, and high explosive rounds to wreak havoc in the city behind them. Senshini watched them as they hurtled over the advancing Jouryan line like falling constellations. The first of them hit home a split second later. He felt their impact through the lurching hull of the tank as they detonated with a sound like an earthquake, a dozen shells ripping into Septiam City, lighting up the walls and throwing the makeshift defences into harsh silhouettes against the flame.
Manticore artillery tanks to the rear of the Jouryans' armour added bright streaks of rockets, like claw marks against the dark sky, and one of the Gathalamorians' Deathstrike launchers sent a fat missile thudding into the city just beyond the wall where it erupted into a blue-white ball of nuclear flame.
Answering fire spattered back from the walls, a dusting of glitter that was distant small arms fire, autoweapons and lasguns.
'Squadron Twelve is giving us a ranging shot.’ said Kaito through the tank's intercom, his voice punctuated by explosions growing closer.
'Understood, sir.’
Squadron Twelve was a few hundred metres to the left, consisting of two Leman Russ tanks with las-cannon sponsons and a Vanquisher tank hunter; the squadron functioning as a nugget of anti-armour firepower in the infantry line.
Senshini swivelled the targeter to get a view of Squadron Six's Vanquisher tank firing a tracer shell towards the walls. It fell just short of the walls in a crimson starburst.
'Squadron Twelve, this is Squadron Six gunner.’ said Senshini into the tank's primitive field vox unit. We got that. Make it three hundred metres to blastgun range.'
'Squadron Six, this is Squadron Command.’ came the voice of the artillery's command section, mounted in a Salamander command vehicle a few hundred metres back. 'You have the short range, move forward for combined long range firing.’
'Yes, sir. Squadron Six out.’ Kaito flicked off the vox. 'Get us closer, Tanako. We need to get into range the same time as the Vanquishers.’
'Let's just hope some of those footsloggers follow us up.’ said Tanako bleakly as he gunned the Executioner's engines and accelerated.
The Jouryans in front of them would be in the first wave to hit the walls. Senshini had heard that such a thing was a great honour to many soldiers, but then he had also heard that there were a lot of crazy men in the Guard.
The thin, dark line of Jouryans crept closer to the city outskirts as the fire from the walls increased and the next waves of artillery hit home. Somewhere on the other side of the city the Stratix XXIII would be doing the same, gang-scum conscripts hurrying to get to grips with the defenders in the close-quarters butchery at which they excelled. And inside the city, defenders would be manning the walls even as they died, then rising from the dead again, if there was enough left of them.